The Hipster, The Hacker, And The Hustler

On this episode Russell talks about the three personality types you have to have for a startup company, and who each of them were with Clickfunnels. Here’s some fun stuff from today’s episode:

What it means to have a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler in a company and what jobs they do.

Why not having each of those things will result in it being harder to start your business.

And find out why the founders in a startup are usually their own target audience.

So listen here to find out if you’re a hipster, hacker, or hustler, and which piece you’re missing while trying to get your business off the ground.

Full Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m still laying in bed, but I got one more thought for you that I just gotta share.

Alight so, I just finished the last episode and I was about to go to bed and then Todd and I were talking about this concept and then I started Googling it and I found an image and a diagram and it’s so exciting that I gotta share it with you.

Okay, so what we were talking about, back in the early days of Clickfunnels, when the whole thing started and we didn’t have any money to afford 40 developers who were in the office today, and the 200 support people who are at home working for you and the entire team that is amazing and here to support Clickfunnels.

And we were talking about, just the good old days and what happened and how we do these hack-a-thons. It was funny because we decided to go to bed at 11:30 tonight, and it was funny because we’re like, “Remember back before when we were broke and poor and hustling and had to…” We were pulling all nighters like 5, 6, 7, 8 nights in a row just to get Clickfunnels live. And some of you guys probably, if you have binge listened to this podcast you’ve heard those episode. I’m driving home at 4 in the morning, “I’m doing this episode so I won’t fall asleep and I won’t die.” That happened more than once. And if you haven’t listened to this go to marketingsecrets.com/binge and download the binge guide and go binge listen to all the episodes because I’ve been going on this journey with you guys.

Anyway, so we were just reminiscing about that and we’re like, “We’ve got more money now, we should just go to bed.” But we’re like, “We miss the good old days and how fun it would be if we went on vacation and locked ourselves in closet and just built our team again.”

Anyway when we were talking about that Todd said he’d read an article or saw a post or something about how there’s like three core personalities that you have to have in a start up. And it’s fascinating, because if you look at the original founders of Clickfunnels, there were three of us. Shortly thereafter we brought in a few partners and team members, and then it grew from there.

But initially there were, and it’s funny as he said this, I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s true with us.” So if you look at the three co-founders of Clickfunnels, originally. Number one, well I’ll give Todd number one. Todd’s number one, right and if you look at the archetype of his role, I’ll pull up his image, he is the hacker, or the engineer. Number two then was our second co-founder who is no longer a part of the company, but he was one of the original co-founders, his name was Dylan, and Dylan is the hipster, or the designer. And number three is you have to have the hustler, who is the entrepreneur who is out there drumming up business and selling stuff.

So the three architects, the three types you need is a hacker, a hipster, and a hustler. So the hacker, the hipster, and the hustler. And we were dying laughing because we’re like, “Oh my gosh that is true.” Todd was the hacker, who hacked together software, we didn’t have a big development team. So Todd had to do everything from database administration to coding, to frontend, to backend, all that stuff. It was just him.

Then the designer, Dylan was doing the UI design and the graphic design and the logo design and the sales letter design.

And the hustler, I was writing copy, I was doing webinars, I was making phone calls, I was doing JV’s.

And initially it’s just, that’s what it is, the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler. So I thought that was awesome. And the other thing, as I was Googling it tonight, looking at it, there was one kind of caveat here that said that, this phase of the business, the start up phase where there’s the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler, the founder is or was the target user of what they were creating. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s so true.”

When you start doing a startup, what is it you’re creating? When you’re creating a new info product or a new software company, or a new supplement company, whatever, you the founder, you are the target market. You’re the target user, that’s why you don’t have to get focus groups and have people go out there researching and talking to customers, all that stuff, because you are the customer.

That’s why Clickfunnels works so well. Because I am you, I am our dream customer. In fact, as I was working with the dev team today and we were talking, it was kind of funny because I was like, “I am the biggest hyper user of Clickfunnels.” I feel the pains as much, if not more than every other member on our platform. Anything you guys are frustrated by, I promise I am 100 times more frustrated by it, which is why we care about what you guys are doing, because we care about ourselves. We are the target user.

So in this startup phase, the founder is or was the target user. So for you, you’re the target user for your product and that should be your focus groups. And then the second piece is like looking at your team and who are the pieces you need. And I love this definition of the hipster, who is the designer. The hacker, who’s the engineer. And the hustler, who is the sales and marketing dude who is out there selling like crazy.

Anyway, I thought that would be fun to share with you guys as a lot of you are in startup mode, as you’re thinking through things, or maybe you’re trying to grow and you’re stuck and you’re like, “ahh.” And maybe it’s like, “Oh, that’s it. We’re missing the hipster. We’re missing the hacker. Or we’re missing the hustler.” Finding those people.

Its interesting, I see people in the startup phase, one of the biggest mistakes people make is they’re not going into it with all the different essential personality types you need to run a business. I did an episode a while ago about the DIS test alone. If you look at DIS test and it’s like, if you don’t have someone on your team that’s a high D, that’s driving this thing, it’s going to be really hard off the ground.

And if you’re starting and you’re the founder and you take the DIS test, and you don’t have a high D and no one does, it’s like, my guess is that you guys have been procrastinating for a long time. You’re six months, a year, two years into this and you’re not successful yet. Because you don’t have a driver. You need that personality archetype to be able to push this thing and get it off the ground.

So this is just another one of those lenses of like, it’s funny, it makes me laugh because it’s exactly what we had when we were doing this, the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler. Again, look at that as you’re building out your team, as you’re looking at why we’re struggling. Which one of those pieces may you potentially be missing? And then from there it grows out right.

And it’s interesting, we were talking about this as well, if you look at that, from his side, the hacker. From the hacker now, he was the one personally doing all those things initially. And then it’s like, you start hiring a team, it’s like, okay we need someone who just specializes in this one piece, and specializes in this piece, and this piece. And it’s like, it takes a dozen people to be able to do all the individual pieces, but that’s how you get to the next phase of growth.

Think about with me initially, I was literally writing copy, designing the funnels, designing the graphics, doing the emails. I was doing all the different pieces, and I was doing them good, but now it’s like we find people who are great, but they specialize in each of them. So we got one person who’s better at copy than me, one person who’s better at graphics, one person that’s better at funnels than me, one person that’s better that, you know, that’s kind of the second phase of it, I believe.

Anyway, I thought that was kind of cool and exciting as I was thinking through it. So there you go guys, if you’re wondering, it’s the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler. I hope you enjoyed that. I’m going to get to bed for real this time. Appreciate you all and I’ll talk to you guys soon. Bye.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.